March 23, 2012 AT 11:28 am

Arduino Face Follower

Here is another Arduino and Processing project I built this weekend. A face follower allows to track people faces and to track them in a scene, captured thru a webcam. My face follower is simple. It is built on the previous project LaserGun, and the code is very similar. The Arduino part is exactly the same, actually.

This face detection and tracking system is built based on Arduino and OpenCV. The webcam sends video frames to OpenCV running on a Windows PC. If OpenCV detects a face it will track it and calculate its center’s X,Y coordinates. The coordinates are then passed on to the Arduino via a serial USB connection. The Arduino controls the movement of the webcam with the help of two pan/tilt servos to follow the detected face.

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering" - Freeman Dyson